Verizon's CEO says carriers are warming up to "a third ecosystem", expects it to be Windows Phone

When the CEO of the largest US carrier talks, everyone in the mobile industry should listen, since the US market has superior visibility, making it somewhat of a trendsetter recently.

Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia event yesterday, Lowell McAdam, the CEO of Verizon, had expressed his beliefs that in the next 12 months Windows Phone will win the battle with RIM for the "third ecosystem" to take on Android and iOS.

Besides RIM's QNX and Windows Phone, he had also mentioned Samsung's bada as having a fighting chance, but the ultimate winner he believes to be Microsoft. Scoring Nokia as its de facto handset manufacturing arm this year, must have tipped the scales in Redmond's favor:

The carriers are beginning to coalesce around the need for a third ecosystem. Over the next 12 months I think it will coalesce and you will start to see one emerge as a legitimate third ecosystem. In my opinion, it’ll be between RIM and Microsoft, and I expect Microsoft to come out victorious.

Microsoft itself, however, is not completely convinced it will pull it off. An anonymous blogger under the name of Mini-Microsoft (from Mini-Me, of course), who claims to be mid-manager at the company, has posted some internal memos from a high-ranking employee online, which reveal his honest take on the whole mobile saga:

WP7 is a good product but as others have alluded to, MSFT is way late to the party in terms of highly functional / attractive UI / rich app eco-system smartphones. The Nokia deal only allows MSFT some hope at playing catch-up at this point

The US is a nation where the carriers call the shots, and if the largest one has a mindset that Windows Phone will be bi-winning in the next year or so in the battle for the third place and for the carriers' hearts, then Nokia, Samsung, HTC, LG and the other WP warriors might just start putting some extra effort in their Windows Phones.

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"Samsung's bada as having a fighting chance"
At least he mentions bada : )

From what my inside sources hav been telling me, Samsung will now push bada, and might even get LG and HTC to make bada phones. If that is correct, then i think bada will have a better chance of becoming the third ecosystem than WP7 (after all, bada still has more market share than WP7).

I know I read somewhere that bada was intended to be a sort of OS for dumbphones, something to allow low-end phones to add apps. How can it be compared to Android if its main purpose is to be simple? Not that there's anything wrong with simple and stable, but Peter keeps crowing that everyone except Motorola will abandon Android and go running to bada. From what I've read, bada isn't for power users, so I can't see that happening.

That's what the Americans think in the land of the free, the land of the proud, the land of the best...

Anything that is not American does not exist lol.

There is a huge market outside of the US man.

In fact, over here in Europe, bada is a common OS (especially in France).

Just because bada is not in the US yet, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It only means that Samsung knows that in the US, everyone are patriots and want American OSes. Google, Microsoft, Apple, AMERICAN ! and therefore wait with releasing bada in the US untill it has more market share in europe.

well, Saab is not bankrupt yet, there is still hope for Saab, but it doesn't look good for Saab at the moment.

When it comes to Symbian, that has been a very popular OS in europe. And the sales for Symbian only went down after Mr. Elop killed symbian and announced they where going for WP7 (ahem, a Canadian choosing a American Os before a european OS...).

The sales for Symbian 3 was very good untill stupid Mr. Elop killed Symbian sales.

When Symbian 3 came out on the Nokia N8, C7 and E7, it sold very good. In fact, before Elop killed Symbian Symbian had the largerst market share. It was only after Elop killed Symbian did Symbians market share declined rapidly.

30.DearMrFantasy (unregistered)

In 2006 symbian had a market share of close to 73%. In 2010 the marketshare was reduced to 37.6%. In the start of 2011 a partnership with microsoft was announced. Symbian was failing. It doesn't get any more straight forward than that. Give it up!

This is true. The Galaxy S and S2 have had phenomenal sales and the S2 just went on sale here. But when was the last time a major technology development excluded the US? Cell phones, Palm, Blackberry (ok, Canada, "America's hat"), iPhone, Android... we may not be the biggest market for tech anymore, but I'd argue we're still the most consequential.

31.Derp (unregistered)

Ahhh...Peter, right on queue - you're always the first to post on a WP7 article with disparaging remarks about WP7,(or at least to downplay any positives cited in the WP7 article), and then you go on to tout Bada.

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